Saturday, November 18, 2017
Sondheim's Religious Vision
The
man who wrote "thieves get rich / saints get shot / God don't answer
prayers a lot" can be trusted when he says that religious rites and
beliefs have played no part in his life.
Joy
Before we look for Sondheim’s version of sin or redemption, we can bury that canard about his killing joy. His intention, at least, is to evoke it. “Joy” was his own word when he met with teens (including me) at Broadway’s Music Box Theater in June 1977.
Asked about Pacific Overtures, which some critics called “arid” and “cold,” Sondheim said, “I would like to think [audiences] would feel a kind of joy” seeing the imagination and skill in the way the story was told, whether or not they warmed to the subject. His admirers are familiar with that kind of joy: “We revel in the glories that his works endlessly yield,” writes composer Jason Robert Brown. “This is the true gospel: this thing we do, this art we propose to create, can aspire to a greater perfection, a truer and richer transcendence” (“Worshiping in the Church of Steve,” Kennedy Center, 2002). (See my blogpost on the joy of Pacific Overtures).
Redemption
But Sondheim has indeed robbed the musical of the happy ending, giving us instead something more affecting and real, a new start. Theologians would call that redemption. The most prominent example is Into the Woods, when the false promise of happiness in Act I, “Ever After,” is followed by life-and-death struggles in Act. II. The end of the play is just the beginning for a reconstituted family, and Sondheim sends the audience out of the theatre with a caution and a hope: “Into the woods / You go again, / You have to every now and then,” but “everything you learn there / Will help when you return there.”
The Frogs shows faith that theatre can effect a change of heart and perhaps a change of life, when the company instructs the audience to save their community: “Citizens of Athens / If you’re smart, / Don’t sit around while Athens / Falls apart,” concluding, “And now – We start.”
Merrily We Roll Along seems to lack redemption, retracing a life to the point where Franklin Shepherd’s friendships start their doomed trajectory. But as we see young friends on a roof marveling at Sputnik and looking forward to “so much stuff to sing” in “Our Time,” the joyfulness in Sondheim’s music makes it possible to feel that there’s a chance to start over and get it right this time – if not for Franklin Shepard, then for us. (Read my blogpost on Merrily "Rhymes with Integrity").
Other Sondheim finales promise renewal instead of final reward. Anyone Can Whistle ends “With So Little to Be Sure Of,” sung by a pair ready to begin new lives, apart. Sunday in the Park with George builds to a song about taking risks (“Move On”) and finishes with the words, “A blank page or canvas. So many possibilities.” The bachelor Robert of Company doesn’t show up for his birthday party in the final scene, leaving his friends to conclude that he has left the “warm” and “cozy” life of “Side by Side by Side” to seek a committed relationship, because he has learned that "alone is... not alive." Follies ends with couples shaken, but shorn of illusions; A Little Night Music concludes with several relationships rearranged and renewed; and Bounce [since revised to be Road Show] ends with the brothers ambling off into eternity, saying, “Sooner or later, we’re bound to get it right.” (They’re in a hokey Heaven, but this and other posthumous appearances in Sondheim’s works are for framing the play, not an endorsement of the doctrine of life after death.)
Judgment
Before redemption is possible, there must be what theologians call judgment, when people recognize they’re on the wrong path. Follies is explicitly about “The Road You Didn’t Take.” Using ghosts of the past and pastiche songs of youthful optimism, Sondheim and his collaborators confront characters with the disparity between cherished illusions and reality. Merrily takes a microscopic look into Franklin Shepard’s moment of judgement, a violent dissolution of his personal life at the pinnacle of his professional success. The show looks backward from that moment for an answer to the question, “How did you get so far off the track?” Along the way Charley and Mary “nudge” him back to the right path, and Mary tells Franklin after a deep crisis, “Now you know… It’s called letting go your illusions / And don’t confuse them with dreams.” But he doesn’t get it.
Some of the most powerful numbers in Sondheim’s scores dramatize this moment of recognition in a character’s life. In “Rose’s Turn” (Gypsy), “Live, Laugh, Love” (Follies), and “Send in the Clowns” (Night Music), characters passing middle age realize that while they’ve been filling “scrapbooks,” laying out their lives “like lines on a graph,” or “tearing around … opening doors,” they have missed their chances to love and be loved. In two powerful Sondheim songs, “Too Many Mornings” (Follies) and “Lesson #8” (Sunday) the singers imagine their lives “wasted,” “Leaving no mark,” “merely” (or “just”) passing through. Sondheim’s Assassins sing how they “have a right to expect” that they’re going to “connect, connect, connect,” and lash out because they learn “it’s never gonna happen.”
Sin, a Failure of Vision
How do characters get into such a fix? Theologians’ answer to that is sin, which in Sondheim’s work seems to be a failure of vision. Focused on an illusory and selfish goal, the character fails to see the individual worth of any other person. Near the end of Into the Woods, the Baker concludes that our moral responsibility is to enter into others’ perspectives, to “honor” (by understanding) the “terrible mistakes” of others – fathers, mothers, giants, witches – remembering always that “holding to their own, thinking they’re alone” is going to do great damage.
Sondheim depicts characters so focused on attaining “class” (Gene in Saturday Night), “success” (Ben in Follies), or “the glamorous life” (Desiree in Night Music), and becoming “rich and happy” (Franklin in Merrily) that they fail to see how they neglect and hurt the people who would love them. The Witch thinks she can preserve what she calls “Our Little World” (Into the Woods) by locking Rapunzel in a tower. Similarly, Rose (Gypsy) tries to keep her “babies” from growing up for the sake of her own “dream.” Focused on revenge, Sweeney Todd blurs everyone together as either “wicked” or deserving euthanasia (“Epiphany”), and he doesn’t recognize his own family.
Creation: Life is Good
Contrast Sondheim’s monsters Sweeney and Rose with a pair of saints who “belong together,”George and Dot (Sunday in the Park). Each is concerned with making a mark, not “passing through / Just like the people out strolling on Sunday.” Dot makes her connection to posterity through relationships. George, far from having “No Life,” enters vicariously into the lives of the individuals he sketches, singing their songs with them to make art that lives “forever.” The song “Children and Art” underscores how their approaches to life are complementary: As their story naturally deals with vision, connection, and mortality, this collaboration between Sondheim and James Lapine is the most complete statement of Sondheim’s overview of what theologians call creation, the nature of life itself.
In a word, creation is beautiful. “Pretty is what changes,” George explains to his mother, who laments the disappearance of pretty views. “What the eye arranges / Is what is beautiful.” Not only “all trees, all towers” are worthy of close attention for George, but also the individuals – from high-society women down to the cranky garbage man and his dog. George’s mother, suddenly aware that her own life is slipping away moment by moment, urges him, “Quick! Draw it all!” (See my reflection "Sunday, Art, and Forever")
After this song about mortality and eternity comes the anthem “Sunday.” George “revises the world,” posing the characters. When he tenderly takes Dot’s hand to put finishing touches on her portrait, he softly hums, confirming how this painting is his expression of love for her. From that quiet passage, the chorus builds to the word “forever.” Sondheim’s anthem, interweaving all the strands of the play – its story, themes (vision, eternity, connection), design, musical motifs – is made more poignant in a live performance by the knowledge that this perfect consummation is passing even as we watch. No wonder audiences often weep for “Sunday”!
Sondheim Practices What He Preaches
As George does, as the Baker advises, Sondheim takes extraordinary care to honor the individual perspectives of characters, even minor ones, with the kind of richly layered polyphony that is his specialty (“Company,” “Four Black Dragons,” “Pretty Lady,” “Something Just Broke”). His favorite song, “Someone in a Tree,” celebrates diversity of perspective. He finds interest even in assassins, con men, a stalker (Fosca in Passion), a rapacious judge and a demon barber. We don’t have to forgive them, but through imagination and eloquence, we understand them
Sondheim’s own career exemplifies another moral imperative that even some of his bad guys get right: Don’t settle for “living life in the living room” (Gypsy). “Fall if you have to, but … make a noise” (Whistle). “A person should celebrate everything passing by” (Night Music). “Burn your bridges, start again / Or you’ll never grow” (Merrily). “Stop worrying where you’re going, move on” (Sunday in the Park). “Without a risk, the world seems pretty tame” (Bounce / Road Show).
And, in the words of the only full-fledged god to speak in Sondheim’s work (Pluto in The Frogs): “When you’re not afraid to die, / Then you’re not afraid to live.”
(For many, many more articles of related interest, see my Sondheim page.)
(For many, many more articles of related interest, see my Sondheim page.)
After Sondheim's death in 2021, Central Synagogue in New York did a solemn, beautiful tribute with thoughtful words and a medley of Sondheim songs to fit the context of a religious service. Synagogue Tribute.
(This essay was printed as "So Many Possibilities: A Look at Sondheim's Religious Vision" in the Sondheim Review, Winter 2006, pp. 21-22. Since I wrote it, and the journal is defunct, I suppose that I don’t break any copyright laws by posting it here -- or, if I do, that no one will care.)
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